I love C and C++, but setting up projects can sometimes be a pain.Every time I wanted to start something new I'd spend the first hour writing CMakeLists.txt, figuring out find_package, copying boilerplate from my last project, and googling why my library isn't linking. By the time the project was actually set up I'd lost all momentum.So, I built Craft - a lightweight build and workflow tool for C and C++. Instead of writing CMake, your project configuration goes in a simple craft.toml: [project] name = "my_app" version = "0.1.0" language = "c" c_standard = 99 [build] type = "executable" Run craft build and Craft generates the CMakeLists.txt automatically and builds your project. Want to add dependencies? That's just a simple command: craft add --git https://github.com/raysan5/raylib --links raylib craft add --path ../my_library craft add sfml Craft will clone the dependency, regenerate the CMake, and rebuild your project for you.Other Craft features: craft init - adopt an existing C/C++ project into Craft or initialize an empty directory. craft template - save any project structure as a template to be initialized later. craft gen - generate header and source files with starter boilerplate code. craft upgrade - keeps itself up to date.CMakeLists.extra.cmake for anything that Craft does not yet handle.Cross platform - macOS, Linux, Windows.It is still early (I just got it to v1.0.0) but I am excited to be able to share it and keep improving it.Would love feedback. Please also feel free to make pull requests if you want to help with development!
FL score
out of 100
Verdict
high confidence
Competition
7
competitors found, mature market, funded players
Trend
No signal yet
A 'Cargo-like' C/C++ build tool offering simpler project setup and dependency management, but facing an insurmountable wall of free, big-tech-backed competitors.
The pain
The gap
Build angle
Strengths
Questions about this idea?
FlyBot reads the scoring and gives you a second opinion on “I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++”.
Risks
Next steps
Fly Labs Method
Is the pain real, is there a gap, is it the right time, can one person build it.
The pain of C/C++ build setup is real and specific, but the market is heavily dominated by powerful, free, and funded alternatives, severely limiting the gap and willingness to pay. While the idea is technically feasible for a solo builder, monetization is highly unlikely.
Value Equation
Dream outcome and how likely it feels, against the time and effort it costs.
While the pain is real and the idea's value is clear, the market is dominated by free, well-funded players, making commercial viability and differentiation extremely difficult.
One-Person Business
Curiosity pull, identity fit, and a path from free value to paid for a solo creator.
A clear problem solved by a passionate creator, but the highly competitive and non-monetizable market makes it unsuitable for a solo builder.
Viral Frameworks
Hook strength, shareability, and how cheaply it can be tested.
Despite a clear value proposition, the absence of a viable business model and severe distribution challenges make this an unsuitable micro-SaaS.
Builder Lens
Evidence the problem exists, timing, defensibility, and a model that fits on a napkin.
A real problem but a challenging market dominated by free, powerful tools, making a narrow paying wedge difficult to find.
Why this verdict
Five lenses, one composite. How scoring works
The angle
This weekend
Who is already there, mature market
An open-source, decentralized, and multi-platform package manager for C/C++ that helps create and share native binaries.
Pricing: Open Source (free)
A C++ library manager for Windows, Linux, and macOS, simplifying dependency acquisition and management.
Pricing: Open Source (free)
An open-source build and test tool from Google designed for fast, reproducible, and hermetic builds across multiple languages and platforms, especially for large, polyglot monorepos.
Pricing: Open Source (free)
Meta's open-source, fast, hermetic, and multi-language build system, a rewrite of the original Buck, designed for large-scale monorepos.
Pricing: Open Source (free)
An open-source build system designed for speed and user-friendliness with multiplatform support, fast full and incremental builds, and cross-compilation capabilities.
Pricing: Open Source (free)
A CMake-driven cross-platform package manager for C/C++ projects, enabling organized builds across various platforms.
Pricing: Open Source (free)
An open-source, cross-platform build toolchain for developing and packaging C and C++ code, emphasizing a coherent model.
Pricing: Open Source (free)
What they charge
Recent news
C++ Team Blog, April 09 2026
InfoWorld, February 23 2026
G2, 2026
G2, 2026
G2, 2026
Market signals
The C/C++ build tool and dependency management market is a consistently challenging but essential space. The need for robust solutions is growing, especially with larger, polyglot monorepos and the increasing adoption of AI in development. Recent funding rounds are primarily from large tech companies (Google, Meta, Microsoft) investing in their own open-source tools (Bazel, Buck2, vcpkg) rather than independent startups, indicating a mature market dominated by established players and open-source initiatives.
What frustrates people
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too.The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our own extension appeared daunting. We'd need a small team of sharp engineers and 6-12 months, I figured. And we'd probably still fall short of the performance of a mature system like Parade/Tantivy.Or would we? I'd be experimenting long enough with AI-boosted development at that point to realize that with the latest tools (Claude Code + Opus) and an experienced hand (I've been working in database systems internals for 25 years now), the old time estimates pretty much go out the window.I told our CTO I thought I could solo the project in one quarter. This raised some eyebrows.It did take a little more time than that (two quarters), and we got some real help from the community (amazing!) after open-sourcing the pre-release. But I'm thrilled/exhausted today to share that pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license), on Tiger Data cloud, and hopefully soon, a hyperscalar near you:https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearchIn the blog post accompanying the release, I overview the architecture and present benchmark results using MS-MARCO. To my surprise, we were not only able to meet Parade/Tantivy's query performance, but exceed it substantially, measuring a 4.7x advantage on query throughput at scale:https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-fu
AI
Hi HN!I recently switched from a Fedora/GNOME laptop to a MacBook Air. My old setup served me well as a portable workstation, but I’ve started traveling more while working remotely and needed something with similar performance but better battery life. The main thing I missed was a simple taskbar that shows the windows in the current workspace instead of a Dock that mixes everything together.I built boringBar so I would not have to use the Dock. It shows only the windows in the current Space, lets you switch Spaces by scrolling on the bar, and adds a desktop switcher so you can jump directly to any Space. You can also hide the system Dock, pin apps, preview windows with thumbnails, and launch apps from a searchable menu (I keep Spotlight disabled because for some reason it uses a lot of system resources on my machine).I’ve been dogfooding it for a few months now, and it finally felt polished enough to share.It’s for people who like macOS but want window management to feel a bit more like GNOME, Windows, or a traditional taskbar. It’s also for people like me who wanted an easier transition to macOS, especially now that Windows feels increasingly user-hostile.I’d love feedback on the UX, bugs, and whether this solves the same Dock/Spaces pain for anyone else.P.S. It might also appeal to people who feel nostalgic for the GNOME 2 desktop of yore. I started my Linux journey with it, and boringBar brings back some of that feeling for me.
AI
### Describe the project you are working on Godot C# bindings ### Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project For the past weeks, I've been discussing with several Unity users intending to move to Godot C# regarding dealing with the C# garbage collector. The most common complaint I hear from users is that, in Unity, allocations can trigger unexpected GC spikes into the game. In Godot, we target to make all of the high performance APIs (those that intended to be called every frame) not allocate any memory, so theoretically the GC should not be a problem. Additionally, Godot starting from 4.0, uses the Microsoft CoreCLR version of .net, which also supposedly has a better garbage collector than Unity. But in all, after several discussions with Unity users, neither is enough reassurance for them, and they would really feel safer if Godot exposed a zero allocation API. ### Describe the feature / enhancement and how it helps to overcome the problem or limitation The idea of this proposal is that Godot exposes zero allocation versions of many functions in the C# API, that users can use if they desire. Technically, this could be done from the binding generator itself, without breaking compatibility, and without doing any modification to Godot itself. ### Describe how your proposal will work, with code, pseudo-code, mock-ups, and/or diagrams **WARNING** I am not familiar with C#, so take this as pseudocode. Imagine you have two functions exposed as to C#: ```C# void MyClass.SetArray( Vector2[] array); Vector2[] MyClass.GetArray(); ``` This works and is pretty and intuitive. However, it has two problems: * GC is allocated on return * Memory is copied to Godot native formats every time there is a call. The idea is to add NoAlloc versions, which can be generated directly by the binder automatically when required: ```C# void MyClass.SetArrayNoAlloc( Godot.Collections.PackedVector2Array array); void MyCl
AI